"Dear A,

I hope you are doing well, we haven’t talked for months now. What a strange thing, don’t you think? But I’m always thinking of you, everyday.

I don’t know what happened.. Actually I do. I am not able to forgive you certain things, or maybe I am not able to forgive myself. 

Everything is well on my end, except for the nostalgia, the absence, loneliness, and deep breaths. I have found a notebook you gave me years ago where you had written some poems by Montale. I used to keep it with me all the time in my bag before they locked us inside again. Now I store it in the top drawer, with my underwear, my undershirts, and my few bras. The most precious things are to be kept in private drawers.

 

There are things that have been separating us for some time, which you also know. I could come up with ten or twenty things that have brought me away from you, but this time I want to be honest. There are things that, as you know very well, are important to you, your ideas, your fights. I ask you to trust me when I say that they are important to me as well and that I have always been by your side, perhaps with more reticent speeches and sometimes with some irony, but I’ve always been there.

Yes, I have always been by your side, enthusiastic yet a traitor, happy yet full of guilt and shame… not sure why. I am telling you these things asking you not to judge me, as I have always feared your judgement, and this fear is probably what has separated us. 

After the first year of the relationship, he started being violent to me. At first, they were sudden and inattentive movements, a hand on my neck, a quick pull on my arm. Then they became kicks, slaps, spits, food, locked doors so that he wouldn’t get to me. I don’t want to tell you any details, they are not important and I am trying to forget them. But I would like to tell you how I felt, and I wish I could tell you while you hug me and I dry my tears on your sweater. I’m not sure if it was for shame or pain, but the very next morning I would get up and forget everything, like if nothing had happened. Maybe that was when I started lying to myself, and when you succeed at lying to yourself, you can lie to the rest of the world. I had completely lost faith in my intelligence as a person and as a woman, fearing that others would do the same.

And so you would ask me: why didn’t you leave, why did you stay? All I can say is that I don’t know. I couldn’t do it, not until I actually did, which is when I left his house after he had hurt me. I had been laying in my bed all day, with my hair pulled on the sheets.. I can’t say how much I cried. But I remember that was the moment when I crossed my very eyes on the mirror, the same one I would use every morning before going to work, proud of myself, and the same one I would avoid after our fights so that I wouldn’t see my marked face pretending, once again, that everything was alright. So that was the time I said ‘enough’, I took my things, and I left. It’s hard for me to revisit those moments again, I get nauseous, angry, I want revenge, I want to tell my story and ruin him. And I know this is an unhealthy thought, but, to be honest, it crosses my mind.

I have been walking with this burden on my shoulders. I have been believing this is the ‘kind’ gift of violence: the pain, the shame towards myself and others, the loss of self esteem from the woman I am. But then I soon realized that the biggest gift hadn’t been unwrapped yet. I truly understood it when I met someone else. One night this person held me, tried to get close to me, and all I could do in response to his kindness was to find shelter in the type of tears that show up with no warning and deform your face. And with difficulty I told him everything for the first time. Maybe it was because I didn’t know him, maybe it was because I felt him close, or maybe because I wanted him to be close but couldn’t really feel him. Allowing myself to be happy, to fall in love, my dear, it’s the hardest thing. I often found myself feeling guilty for my happiness, for my new story, for the new family I was getting to know. Everytime I felt happy he would crawl into my head, although everything seems so far away now that I am writing to you: my house in London, the pain on my face, all the moments I wished I never had to live. He moved to Milano, this past summer he decided he wasn’t going back to London anymore, and as soon as he told me, I had a strange feeling. I started telling what I never thought I would be able to tell. I started feeling lighter. He kept insisting on seeing me to give me back the things I had left in London when I ran away. So I went to him, afraid of finding a violent man, and not the partner I had shared with many years of my life, holding my phone with a number already dialed. I talked to him about the new person, about our story, about my happiness that I didn’t want to hide anymore. I talked to him for the first time about his physical and psychological violence on me. But when he answered me, with those eyes that I hadn’t forgotten, that the real victim was him and not me, that’s where I was scared again. I felt blood freezing in my veins once again… But I was really free for the first time, free of being happy, finally free of loving myself before anyone else, of making love to whomever I wanted and being able to say it, free of not being ashamed. I was free from his disgusting hands and from his sick mind. 

There are few instances where I remember feeling such happiness. The next day, when I was putting away my clothes, my books, I could smell that house and I finally felt far away from that nightmare.

I wish I could have told you all of this, but even now, as you can see, I’m hiding behind a letter.

When I decided to talk about it, I did with other people and not you because you were always busy and there was always something more important to do. I truly needed you and I did not find you by my side. I know you can say the same for me and that’s why I want to say that I’m sorry. Sometimes it’s hard to forgive mistakes that perhaps are only my fault.

 

How are you?

Love,

M"